frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe

https://andreklein.net/your-epub-is-fine-kobo-disagrees-blame-adobe/
220•sohkamyung•4h ago•89 comments

Write for One Person

https://wizardzines.com/comics/write-for-one-person/
110•evakhoury•2d ago•36 comments

Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing

https://github.com/tamnd/kage
423•tamnd•9h ago•94 comments

Bitsy

https://bitsy.org/
45•tosh•3d ago•3 comments

Firewood Splitting Simulator

https://screen.toys/firewood/
674•memalign•4d ago•218 comments

Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

https://github.com/nex-agi/Nex-N2/issues/4
293•unrvl22•11h ago•156 comments

21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/12/08/21-years-and-counting-of-eight-fallacies-of-distributed-computing/
16•teleforce•2h ago•2 comments

Why Your CPU Is Fast but Your Program Is Slow: Understanding the Memory Wall

https://prawns.dev/blogs/memory-wall
14•prawns_1205•3d ago•4 comments

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/14/ai-is-code-and-cant-be-prompted-into-being-smart...
90•wglb•6h ago•52 comments

Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

https://traceapp.info
106•AG342•1d ago•45 comments

Chaosnet (1981)

https://tumbleweed.nu/r/lm-3/uv/amber.html
68•RGBCube•7h ago•7 comments

Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

165•david927•10h ago•616 comments

Formal methods and the future of programming

https://blog.janestreet.com/formal-methods-at-jane-street-index/?from_theconsensus=1
205•eatonphil•14h ago•74 comments

TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder

https://github.com/meta-pytorch/torchcodec/releases/tag/v0.14.0
26•scott_s•4d ago•3 comments

Segmented type appreciation corner (2018)

https://aresluna.org/segmented-type/
65•unexpectedVCR•3d ago•14 comments

The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE

https://planetscale.com/blog/the-only-scalable-delete
139•hollylawly•3d ago•49 comments

Chopped, Stored, Secured – The Story of the Hash Function

https://0xkrt26.github.io/math_behind_security/2026/06/09/the-story-of-the-hash-function.html
26•denismenace•4d ago•4 comments

The hallucinogenic mushroom that contains no known psychedelic

https://psychedelics.co.uk/news/a-mushroom-genus-that-gets-people-high-but-not-the
31•thunderbong•1h ago•12 comments

Perlisisms (1982)

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
96•tosh•12h ago•49 comments

Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency

https://su3.io/posts/zeroserve-caddy-compat
159•losfair•13h ago•49 comments

Show HN: Discover Wikipedia articles popular on Hacker News

https://www.orangecrumbs.com/
61•octopus143•9h ago•18 comments

FarOutCompany

https://faroutcompany.com/
106•bookofjoe•12h ago•16 comments

I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models

296•iliashad•11h ago•71 comments

Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-users-are-tired-of-microsoft-accou...
105•josephcsible•5h ago•36 comments

The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
215•subset•14h ago•123 comments

Lisp's Influence on Ruby

https://blog.tacoda.dev/lisps-influence-on-ruby-6a54f1a7740e
223•tacoda•3d ago•62 comments

USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits

https://www.aptiv.com/en/insights/article/usb-power-delivery-plugging-into-the-benefits
36•mooreds•3d ago•80 comments

How to earn a billion dollars

https://paulgraham.com/earn.html
475•kingstoned•15h ago•1442 comments

Not everyone is using AI for everything

https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/people-are-consuming-ai-like-they
432•yegg•12h ago•472 comments

Linux 7.1

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wi4BF4bMhZNZ1tqs+FFV4OuZRe3ZqdWB+LxRLmRweUzQw@mail.gmail.com/T/#u
250•berlianta•10h ago•98 comments
Open in hackernews

The Beam

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/the-beam-erlangs-virtual-machine/
105•Alupis•1y ago

Comments

schultzer•1y ago
One thing that is great about Erlang’s pattern matching is that it makes it extremely approachable for writing, lexer, parser and compilers in it: https://github.com/elixir-dbvisor/sql and with Elixir macros and sigils then you can embed other languages like sql and zig to name a few!
wk_end•1y ago
Does Erlang/Elixer have any edge over Ocaml or Haskell in that niche? They also have pattern matching, of course, and strong static types tend to work nicely for compilers too.

Of course, the big superpower they have is the BEAM and the robust multiprocessing support there, but that’s not especially helpful for compilers…or is it?

schultzer•1y ago
Elixir compiler is written in Erlang, Erlang can produce very efficient code, the new json library can beat c libraries at decoding / encoding. And you get this with a strongly typed dynamic language, which is a distributed language. It’s really hard to beat the BEAM, if only we had better number crunching, but in so cases you can always write a nif.
dcsommer•1y ago
"Strongly typed" is stretching it. Type checking is bolted on and not part of `erlc`. Typing is quite unergonomic in Erlang/Elixir (similar to Typescript bolted onto JS).

The type system is one of the weakest parts of the beam ecosystem.

troupo•1y ago
Elixir team is slowly bringing in type checking into the language: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixi... and https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/gradual-set-theoretic-types.html
Munksgaard•1y ago
Erlang/Elixir are certainly strongly typed[0] but they are not statically typed[1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Static_type_checki...

lolinder•1y ago
You can't really use the word "certainly" when speaking about "strongly typed" because the entire concept is fuzzy and subjective. From the article you linked:

> > However, there is no precise technical definition of what the terms mean and different authors disagree about the implied meaning of the terms and the relative rankings of the "strength" of the type systems of mainstream programming languages. For this reason, writers who wish to write unambiguously about type systems often eschew the terms "strong typing" and "weak typing" in favor of specific expressions such as "type safety".

I personally think the whole concept of "strongly typed", which is usually used as a prop to make dynamic languages count as part of the cool kids typed-languages club, should be ditched as a point of argument. The supposed "weakly typed" languages people are usually comparing to (like C) aren't actually framed as viable alternative for problems dynamic languages are suited for, so they're something of a straw man. I'd like to see advocates for dynamically typed languages ditch the obsession with having types like the cool kids and instead focus on showing why dynamism is valuable.

There are plenty of great cases to make for dynamism without having to argue on rhetorical ground that the static languages defined and dominate.

Munksgaard•1y ago
As someone who has used both SML, Haskell, Rust and Elixir professionally: No, not really.

Access to the BEAM is nice, but unless you're targeting the BEAM in your compiler I don't see any benefit. Even if you're targeting the BEAM, you might decide to use another language, cf. Gleam: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/

Edit: Actually, one thing I will mention is the superior support in Elixir/Erlang for pattern matching bitstrings[0]. Not usually helpful in compilers, but an evolution of pattern matching that other languages should take up, in my opinion.

0: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#%3C%3C%3E...

tikhonj•1y ago
OCaml also has a binary string pattern matching feature which sounds pretty similar: https://practicalocaml.com/parsing-with-binary-string-patter...
Rendello•1y ago
Erlang's bitstring/binary handling is one of those things that once you use, you'll wonder why it's not in every language (alongside, for me, Rust's enum/sum types and Python's badly-named but wonderfully useful while-else).
xelxebar•1y ago
Studying the BEAM is definitely on my ToDo list. It's task parallelism sounds exemplar, and I really want to understand the architectural ramifications of choosing fine-grained task parallelism vs. a data parallel-friendly approach.
troupo•1y ago
I wish articles like this had more meat on why BEAM is good.

You have to say why it's good. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015852

brandonpollack2•1y ago
If only there was a typed language that didn't hand wave serialization
mrkeen•1y ago
I don't think we'll ever do better than 'IO is made out of bytes'.
kimi•1y ago
Like Java?
monkfish328•1y ago
Love beam

I just wish elixir had static typing built in :)

arrowsmith•1y ago
Give Elixir a try anyway, you might be surprised:

https://arrowsmithlabs.com/blog/you-might-not-need-gradual-t...

Taikonerd•1y ago
Then you'll love Gleam -- it's a BEAM language with static typing!

https://gleam.run/

idahoduncan•1y ago
The Strand programming book states that an early version of the Erlang runtime was implemented in Strand (see "13.1: History" http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/files/strand-b...), which is an interesting tidbit that I haven't seen come up when the history of Erlang is discussed, like in the featured article.
kristel100•1y ago
It’s fascinating how long the BEAM has lasted. And even more fascinating how relevant its concurrency model still is in today’s async-heavy world. Built different.
Munksgaard•1y ago
I agree that the terminology is not ideal, but think there's a huge difference between JS' "weak types", i.e. abundant implicit conversions, and e.g. Elixirs "strong types", where `1 + "foo"` is a runtime error. I don't care if we call the latter something else though. Any good suggestions?

That said, I prefer having both strong and static typing, but that's another argument.

zbentley•1y ago
I'd suggest "high-cast" and "low-cast". They draw attention to the thing that people usually mean when they talk about strong (not static) typing: whether operations in a language bias towards automatically coercing types so that a non-type-error result can be produced or not. High-cast languages tend towards requiring explicit type conversion; low-cast languages tend towards both implicit conversion and more complex behaviors when more than one type is supplied to a given operation. Also, the terms pun nicely with "high-cost" and "low-cost".

That said, it's still a spectrum and there's a lot of subjectiveness here. Everyone agrees that '1 + "foo"' is meaningless, but what about string multiplication? If a language documents that an integer multiplied by a string repeats the string, is that weakly typed/low-cast, or is it just documented multiplication operator behavior? If string multiplication is a whole separate operator, is that more strongly typed (and if so, are we all gonna be able to sleep at night since that means Perl 5 is more strongly typed than Python)?

That subjectiveness extends into the domain of hidden runtime costs, as well. Theoretically, any iterable of hashable items can be passed to a language's implementation of "HashSet::union(items)". But the implementation/performance of "union()" might differ based on the type of the iterable: should we be allowed to pass a lazy iterator which produces values after arbitrary custom computations? Many languages say "yes" here, but some consider collecting/each-ing the iterator something that must be explicit so the cost/exhaustion/side-effectfulness of the iteration is made clear. How about unioning a set with a vector, versus another set? Very different algorithmic behavior happens inside the union if another hash set is supplied instead of, say, a static array or linked list; while the complexity for nonlazy unions is always O(N), the average complexity/wallclock performance may be very different. Rust's stdlib, for example, discourages this kind of heterogenous union (not, I suspect, out of a desire for high-cast-explicitness, but because it wants to encourage use of its lazy O(1) union system instead). Are the answers to that question part of the high-cast/low-cast (or strong/weak type system) spectrum, or are they just specific choices made by each language's collections library? Ask 10 programmers, and I suspect you'll get a lot of different answers.

cess11•1y ago
Dialyzer might be considered "bolted on", but the BEAM itself is strongly and dynamically typed. In Elixir the compiler is getting static typing as well.

https://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof

These languages have other properties that can play the role that types are sometimes relied upon to do. It's uncommon that I think in types at all when building things in Elixir, thinking about shapes usually gets me all the way.

In my experience string processing libraries are the weakest part, due to some of them having abysmal performance for whatever reason. Last I had this problem I wanted to do ETL on mbox files but gave up and did it with someone's PHP one-class weekend project instead.

cess11•1y ago
You probably don't, Numerical Elixir/Nx has been out for years and did the NIF:ing for you.

It's one part of why it's quite convenient to juggle ML and LLM tasks on the BEAM, and easy enough that I can manage it.

https://github.com/elixir-nx